From London to Sydney in two hours: Virgin Galactic's other possible service | Wired 2013 video

"Governments can be great innovators, but the ecosystem of
innovation has failed with space because the private sector hasn't
been involved until now," said Virgin Galactic's
commercial director Stephen Attenborough, speaking at Wired 2013.

He acknowledged that private space companies like Virgin
Galactic are "standing on the shoulders of giants", referring to
those space racing governments, but hoped that the private sector
could make access to space "safer, cleaner and cheaper".

He said that Virgin Galactic didn't just want to give space
access to rich individuals, but also to researchers. "We want to
offer scientists and researchers space-based research at an unheard
of level of affordability," he said, adding that the first customer
booked to conduct scientific experiments aboard the company's Spaceship Two was Nasa.

Spaceship
Two

Chris Crisman

Virgin's spaceplanes can also be used to place satellites in
space, and the company is building a vehicle specifically to do
that.

It might be possible to travel between London and Sydney
between two and 2.5 hours

Beyond that, he dangled the hope of supersonic, commercially
viable long haul aviation: "If we can get this first step right,
take people into space and keep them safe in commercially viable
aircraft, the aim to try and push long haul aviation above the
fragile atmosphere into space."

"This should be environmentally a lot better," he explained, as
emission will be released outside of the Earth's atmosphere, and it
might be possible to travel between London and Sydney between two
and 2.5 hours. "Followed by three hours in immigration, probably,"
Attenborough joked.

Attenborough hopes that the silence of space will be
"awe-inspiring" and people will have "life-changing views of planet
Earth." He explained that astronauts have reported being affected
profoundly by what they saw out of the window when in space.
"That's the pinnacle of what we are offering."

What it will be like to fly into space
He also gave a taste of what a typical journey with Virgin
Galactic would be like. It would start from Spaceport America,
taking off from a runway in a small spaceship containing six
passengers, attached to a large carrier aircraft. The spacecraft is
carried up in big circles to around 50,000 feet, which was the
cruising altitude of Concorde. There is then a countdown before the
spaceship -- Spaceship Two is released from the carrier, White
Knight Two. This approach is better than the traditional vertical
launch because "it means a lot less fuel" and doesn't involve
"exploding a bomb at ground level with you sitting on the top".

Next there's another countdown and "everything in the cabin
changes dramatically". The spacecraft travels at 170 knots in
gliding mode, but with the activation of the rocket, it reaches the
speed of sound within six seconds, experiencing 3.5G acceleration
going upwards, accelerating to four times the speed of sound.

"Just when you are getting used to the noise, vibration,
g-forces, the sheer -- I was going to say terror -- the sheer
thrill of it all, then they cut the rocket motors out," said
Attenborough. "So you suddenly weigh nothing at all. There's no
point being in zero gravity if you are just going to be strapped to
a chair." This explains why the cabin has been designed to give
passengers space to float around for a few minutes. "There's no up
nor down. Everything that dictates the way we live will be
gone."

"Space is hard," he said. "In some ways it's not surprising that
only 540 people have been up in 50 years. It's a pretty hostile
environment. But we recognise that there are millions of people who
would like to experience space for themselves."